In mid-16th-century China, a man named Wu Cheng'en wrote Journey to the West, a mythological fantasy inspired by the historical Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who lived in seventh-century China and journeyed to India in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures.
In Wu's retelling, the fictional monk is accompanied by three disciples who serve at once as attendants, companions and protectors. Yet, before any of them join the pilgrimage, the monk is first given a horse — the White Dragon Horse — whose very name echoes an ancient belief that the mightiest steeds are descended from dragons.
While the three disciples, each endowed with supernatural powers, fend off demons along the way, it is the horse that bears the pilgrim himself, carrying him across mountains, deserts and rivers in silence. In the tale featuring a sentient pig and fast-talking monkey, the horse speaks little and rarely claims the foreground; yet without his endurance, the journey could not proceed. In this restraint lies his meaning: the White Dragon Horse embodies devotion without display, strength expressed through constancy and the quiet labor that makes all great quests possible.
For those in the know, the White Dragon Horse is a fictional echo of the "heavenly steeds" — mighty horses introduced to China from the vast lands lying to its west beginning in the 2nd century BC, during the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220).
Along the same routes came the raw jade, later carved by craftsmen into horse-shaped totems, burial objects believed to carry the soul to heaven in the afterlife — another form of pilgrimage that, at least in imagination, brings a life full circle.
This long association between horses and the act of finding one's way — across landscapes, and through life itself — also finds expression in an earlier moral tale set in China around the 7th century BC. Known as Old Horse Knows the Way, the story recounts a winter campaign in which an army lost its direction. A wise minister released an old horse to lead the way, trusting its accumulated experience of the terrain. The horse guided the soldiers safely home, giving rise to the saying Laoma Shitu, denoting that experience can succeed where maps and orders fail.
To be a road companion was to be present at the most charged moments of a life. Horses bore silent witness to shifting moods and decisive passages, returning home after a long sojourn, bidding farewell to an old friend, or setting off for the distant frontier. Such moments, profoundly formative, were carefully recorded in verse, especially between the 7th and 13th centuries, during China's Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties. It is no exaggeration to say that the imprint of horse hooves runs deep through the poetic history of China.
Today, on the grasslands and river-fed pastures of Gansu province in northwestern China — where the "heavenly steeds" once grazed — modern herds still roam and run, raised on ranches first established in the 1920s.
In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of young men arrived at horse ranches in Gansu, drawn by an ideal of frontier service that defined their generation and later found expression in film and literature — faint yet persistent echoes of the youthful idealism that has inspired heroism on this land since ancient times.
In the hugely popular 2024 TV series To the Wonder, this long tradition quietly finds a contemporary form.
Set on the grasslands of Altay in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, the series follows ordinary lives shaped by work, relationships and gradual self-discovery. Here, the horse is neither a heroic mount nor a romantic symbol, but a steady presence embedded in daily routines. It carries people between pastures and seasons, accompanies departures and returns, and shares fatigue and endurance.
In its understated way, the drama resonates deeply with modern audiences, offering a familiar insight: freedom lies not in mastery, but in learning how to move together.
